The 49ers Are Catering Practice To Their Millennial Players And God, They’ve Even Ruined Football Now, Too

If there’s one things millennials hate, it’s having to earn money to exist in society by working a job. So terrible, being required to do that thing everyone else does.

Millennials despise work. Every bit of it.

“Ugh, this office job doesn’t allow me two free hours in the middle of the day like my college class schedule did.”

“There are no snacks here.”

“Why can’t I work from home every day?”

There is no aspect of office life Millennials won’t complain about.

But what about the ones making millions? Ones who are doing a job they love. You think they’d, like, be okay with putting in a few extra hours of work to, you know, justify their obscene salaries, right?

Nahh, you are underestimating just how lazy millennials are these days. So lazy that even NFL coaches are having to tailor their practices and meetings to accommodate them. From a Wall Street Journal article on how new San Francisco 49ers coach Jim Tomsula is dealing with Generation Y Does Work Suck So Much.

The 49ers coaching staff, led by new head coach Jim Tomsula, realized that they are dealing with the same problem as millions of parents, even if they are dealing with massive, athletic millionaires. The issue is how to relate to a generation—generally described as 18-to-34-year-olds—that has been raised on smartphones and instant information.

As players arrived for voluntary workouts and minicamps this spring and summer, they noticed sweeping changes designed to cater to how research shows millennials learn. That means making concessions for people with shorter attention spans, a desire to multitask and, yes, a need to check their phones all the time.

The changes include shorter meeting times, breaks to check your phone, online calendars instead of printed schedules, and a general “There there, you can do no wrong” ethos that Millennial employees love.

Facing this new reality, the 49ers turned the typical meeting, which on some teams can go for as long as two hours, into 30-minute blocks, each followed by 10-minute breaks that allow players to do what young people do. That is, as Tomsula puts it, to “go grab your phone, do your multitasking and get your fix” before returning the meeting.